Whack-a-Doodles!
- OPINION from KURT STAUDTER (a Vermont reader and sometimes contributor)
Sometimes I can’t really believe what I’m watching or the things I hear. The people in this country have just lost it, and it doesn’t matter which side you’re on. Lately Patti and I use a single word to signify that we’ve just been exposed to the outrageous while watching the news: Whack-a-Doodles. As one might expect there are those on the far right and the distant left that regularly live up to this tag, but lately more and more mainstream, moderate, or middle of the road folks are crossing the line. A quick example is the vaccines for COVID. Right now in this country we continue to have a raging pandemic, however, it seems now it’s just a pandemic of the unvaccinated.
That one fact alone should send the unvaccinated running for the nearest shot, or as the Brits say it, and I love this, for a jab. Now it’s easy for Vermonters to stand back and smirk looking around the country at the vaccine hesitancy because of our exemplarily vaccination rate. Yet, this is a double edged sword: Now that we’re known for the high rate of the vaccinated, people from around the country are coming here for long overdue vacations. I hate to say this, but while this has been great for our tourism based economy, mark my words; we’re hanging out to dry all of the folks that work the retail front counter. We’re doing a lousy job of protecting them from the whack-a-doodles.
How do I know this? I came out of retirement and now I’m one of the tens of thousands of folks in VT that face the public in a retail setting. So when I hear that in the hot spots around the country the Centers for Disease Control is once again telling folks to wear masks indoors, and that they’re unsure if vaccinated people can bring the COVID home and infect other people, I’m starting to fear that we’re turning the clock back to the early days of the pandemic. If that’s true, then all of the folks that come through the store from hot spots are bringing the new variants with them, and no one is wearing a mask anymore. I don’t care if it makes people feel uncomfortable – when dealing with folks from low vaccine, high infection rate locations, and since I don’t know, I’m wearing a mask all the time!
Next we started the January 6 hearings with four heroes last week: DC Metropolitan Police officers Daniel Hodges and Michael Fanone and Capitol Police Sgts. Harry Dunn and Aquilino Gonell. They gave gripping firsthand graphic accounts of what can only be described as near death experiences. Later it would come out that Michael Fanone received a voice mail while he was testifying that is so full of expletives that I can’t quote it here, and it’s not just him, the other officers have testified as to being harassed for coming forward. Every one of the officers in this first day of testimony said their primary motivation for coming forward was the revisionist history of the Republicans downplaying what happened to them. You couldn’t watch this without being embarrassed for us.
The failure of the Republicans to take this seriously is just shameful. If the leadership thinks that ignoring this will make it go away by the midterm elections then they’re whack-a-doodles. Thank you to the two Republicans that chose finding the truth over partisan politics, and if minority leader McCarthy wants to punish them, let’s hope they wear that as a badge of honor for standing up to the mob of whack-a-doodles. To have voted against this committee in my opinion is a violation of their oath. Let’s hope their constituents agree next year.
I’m sorry that I can’t give you the who, what, where and when because I caught it when flipping channels, but early in the Olympics I caught a group of whack-a-doodles on Fox News laughing about the low medal count of the American team: They were reporting that, and I won’t get a quote here because I can’t find it, the reason we weren’t winning medals was because our athletes weren’t patriotic enough, or didn’t love the country. They came to that shocking conclusion because our Olympians were using their spotlight for protests. Fox News delivering faux news? When has that ever happened before? To paraphrase a quote attributed to PT Barnum: “There’s a whack-a-doodle born every minute.”
Finally, this country isn’t going to get back on the rails unless we do at least three things: First, we need to get the country vaccinated; next, we can’t continue to squander trillions of dollars by shoveling it into the maw of the private sector to bailout their neglected infrastructure; and lastly, we’ve been a divided nation long enough, and more than ever we need to put it behind us. The only way we return to being that shining star of hope around the world is to put the divisiveness on hold – It’s a luxury we can’t afford. In our history we’ve always done great things when we banded together: It’s time again for us to do great things. Let’s not look back at this time and have it be remembered by historians as “The Rise of the Whack-a-Doodles.”
